Trapped actress. Jiřina Štěpničková flew to the Estébák family, she served ten years
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The actress also has many comedy roles to her credit. These include Irena Svobodová from Burian’s film The Heroic Captain Korkorán, Emma Voborská from the comedy The Eleventh Commandment, in which she met Hugo Haas, or the executioner’s wife Rosina from the historical comedy Honorary Lady of Pardubice.
In all cases, these were domestic films – during the occupation, Štěpničková refused all offers to star in German films. Shortly after the end of the war, in the harsh Czechoslovak drama Varúj…! she played Bač’s wife Eva, whom (again) two men are trying to do. And then she paused for a while.
In the StB viewfinder
She lived in London, where her son, also actor Jiří Štěpnička, was born in 1947. Shortly before that, she married a graphic artist, a painter and set designer, Jan Samec, who eventually left the family. The actress returned to Czechoslovakia with her son, which became fatal because she got into the StB. In February 1948, she signed the request of cultural workers “Forward, back a step” in support of the National Front, but the clouds still shifted over it.
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She wanted to provide better living conditions for herself and her son, so she decided to emigrate to the West. She was also strengthened by a written invitation from director František Čáp, with whom she also filmed Babička. She had no idea that the letter from him, which she had burned after well-meaning advice, was a hoax. And that the communist secret police are preparing for the past. The place of the dream life came as an arrest while crossing a fictional border in the middle of the deep Šumava forests and separated from the child.
After a two-day trial, she was sentenced in 1952 to fifteen years in prison, of which she served ten.
A story for a movie
A television film made about this fact in 2020. Past director Viktor Polesný. He was inspired by the book by Šárka Horáková Maixnerová – Jiřina Štěpničková, an actress trapped. “I read it and I knew right away that it would be good to work out this story. I know something about how sensitive the topic at the Vinohrady Theater is to this day, “said Polesný. He thus encountered the betrayal of the actress’ colleagues, who demanded the highest sentence, ie death, for her in the form of a petition during the mentioned trial. However, Polesný does not name them in the film.
Before shooting the film, he was also helped by the actor Jiří Štěpnička, who refused to read the screenplay the most. I remember him being painful. “After a while we met, talked and I learned a lot of interesting things. Jirka even offered me a backpack in which I have him across the border, “said the director.
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After watching the film, Štěpnička himself said that his mother was a peculiar woman. “Even my childhood, which I had with her since I was thirteen, was complicated,” he said, remembering those turbulent times. “If I have not been angry at the crime scene, as if she could be angry there as well, I was allowed to visit her four times a year in the Pardubice prison. We always talked – first we were divided by glass, later by wires, and when it approached the sixties, we could sit together in a room at the table. Under supervision, of course. “
Return to acting
The actress eventually returned to the job she loved, but never picked up where she left off. It is worth mentioning her roles as the mother of a young prisoner in Skřivánky na niti, the midwife Dorota Groerová in Hammer on Witches or the aged actress Slávka Hradilová in the comedy drama Hvězda. On television, she played, for example, Aunt Plajznerka in the fairy tale The Forgotten Devil, her grandmother Snížková in the FL series or her mother in Hra, which no one whistled for.
Jiřina Štěpničková, who was tested by fate, died on September 5, 1985 of cancer. She was seventy-two years old.